High priests in the Einstein cult are all skillful money-makers. Champions are Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Jim Al-Khalili, Brian Cox. Recent champions are, of course, LIGO godfathers:

"Nine scientists just won an award that's worth more than a Nobel Prize, earning a cool $1 million for their cutting-edge research. Called the Kavli Prize, these lofty awards... [...] The three winners in astrophysics this year were Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss. The trio won for detecting the ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves — arguably the most remarkable scientific achievement of the year, if not the past 100 years. "This detection has, in a single stroke and for the first time, validated Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity for very strong fields..." http://www.techinsider.io/kavli-prize-winners-2016-6

"Weiss will share the $1.2 million prize with Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, emeritus professor of physics at Caltech. Together, they are cited by the Shaw Foundation “for conceiving and designing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), whose recent direct detection of gravitational waves opens a new window..." http://news.mit.edu/2016/rainer-weiss-awarded-shaw-prize-astronomy-0601

"LIGO Gravitational Wave Researchers to Divide $3 Million. The three ringleaders of the gravitational-wave experiment, known as LIGO, Ronald P. Drever and Kip. S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will split $1 million. The other $2 million will be split among 1,012 scientists who were authors of the article in Physical Review Letters, or who made major contributions to the study of gravitational waves." http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/science/ligo-gravitational-wave-breakthrough-prize-yuri-milner.html

"In addition to a cash award of $500 000, to be shared equally between Drever, Thorne and Weiss, each of the three will receive a gold medal and a citation that reads: The Gruber Foundation proudly presents the 2016 Cosmology Prize to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, Ronald Drever, and the entire LIGO team for pursuing a vision to observe the universe in gravitational waves, leading to a first detection that emanated from the collision of two black holes." http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-05/iau-ro2050416.php

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2017/summary/

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